Movie Review: Me and Orson Welles

As a movie buff, I’ve always been fascinated by the history of Hollywood personalities and few stand out from the pack like Orson Welles. As a wunderkind in 1941, Welles stormed into Hollywood and made Citizen Kane, a film many consider to be the greatest ever made. But before he invaded the movie business, Welles was a popular radio personality and had his own troupe of players at the Mercury Theater in New York. Director Richard Linklater’s new film Me and Orson Welles, tells the story of Welles’ famous 1937 stage production of Julius Caesar.

The “Me” of the title is Richard Samuels, a fictional–as far as I can tell–teenager who is bored with school and tends to spend his after-school hours wandering the New York City streets. A chance encounter with the Mercury Theater production company, Samuels suddenly finds himself cast in a small role in their upcoming production of Caesar.

During one hectic week of rehearsals, Samuels finds himself receiving harsh lessons about the entertainment industry and life itself. He also finds himself in the company of a beautiful and ambitious young woman named Sonja, who has also earned the affection of the arrogant and vindictive Welles.

The story of Samuels is pretty conventional coming-of-age stuff and honestly, it is not that interesting. Because of this, the movie plods along and at times can be very dull. It also doesn’t help that as played by Zac Efron, Samuels feels like a modern character thrown into a 1930s drama. I do think that Efron is a talented actor, but this role just didn’t quite work for him

On the other hand, an actor who I have never heard of, Christian McKay, is spot-on as Welles. Although he may look slightly older than the twenty-two years that Welles would have been in 1937, he has perfected everything from Welles’ larger-than-life, blusterous persona to the subtle facial expressions and tics. Even his eyes look eerily like Welles’. Now, perhaps McKay’s embodiment of Welles is based more on the young Charles Foster Kane than Welles himself, but either way, I felt like I was watching Welles.

Some other characters playing real persons may not have jumped off the screen as the characters they were portraying, but they fit in nicely and the actor playing Joseph Cotton really did look like him.

I did enjoy the behind-the-scenes look at the production of Caesar, which was famous for, among other things, dressing its Shakespearean characters in modern garb that resembled those worn by soldiers in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. I actually wish the film would have focused more on the play itself and the reaction that inevitably had to follow, instead of getting got up in the Richard Samuels plot that just didn’t quite work.